Communications Psychology celebrates the publication of the journal’s first two Stage-2 Registered Reports. We encourage researchers regardless of career stage to consider the format and highlight some considerations for PhD students and early career researchers.

This Registered Report replicates the finding that not checking the personal cost of helping signals trustworthiness. However, in a third-party punishment setup, avoidance of cost-checking only increased trustworthiness in those who also do not punish.

Players in the ultimatum game who deliberately choose to be ignorant about whether they received an unfair offer are more likely to accept unfair offers than participants who actively choose to know.

Most psychological measures are used only once or twice. This proliferation and variability threaten the credibility of research. The Standardisation Of BEhavior Research (SOBER) guidelines aim to ensure that psychological measures are standardised and, unlike toothbrushes, reused by others.

Tracking behaviour in a virtual reality setting allows segmenting and tracking encoding, visual search, working memory usage, and decision-making separately and reveals distinct effects of distraction on these subprocesses.

Communications Psychology celebrates the publication of the journal’s first two Stage-2 Registered Reports. We encourage researchers regardless of career stage to consider the format and highlight some considerations for PhD students and early career researchers.

This Registered Report replicates the finding that not checking the personal cost of helping signals trustworthiness. However, in a third-party punishment setup, avoidance of cost-checking only increased trustworthiness in those who also do not punish.

Players in the ultimatum game who deliberately choose to be ignorant about whether they received an unfair offer are more likely to accept unfair offers than participants who actively choose to know.

Using participants’ self-experienced emotions as ground truth, emotional states were more often categorized correctly using descriptive words analyzed with natural language processing as compared to traditional rating scales.

Positive and negative reciprocity, and costly punishment play, a role in cooperation networks. Members of rural Colombian communities show a strong tendency to punish others perceived as selfish and allocate resources to those perceived as generous.

Israeli and US American respondents who hold zero-sum beliefs about politics were less willing to engage in cross-partisan discussions in the run up to the 2022 election for the Knesset (Israel) and the 2022 Mid Term U.S. elections (USA).

Across four experiments, participants chose to spend more time with partners who made fair offers; likewise, a poor social environment and low opportunity-costs led participants to stay with partners.

Group polarization, a result of social interaction, can underpin political polarization—the division of society into groups. While intergroup conflict and hostility are possible outcomes of polarization, polarization as a mobilizing force for collective action can benefit marginalized groups.